The classical problem of how to make sure that, in hybrid apps, the journey is not broken when transitioning from the native app to the embedded browser, is well known and it has been solved a long time ago. My colleague Carl Sandquist wrote a great post in the official Adobe blog some time ago about how to stitch visitors in hybrid apps. Two years later I still reference it to my customers. I recommend that, before you proceed with the rest of this post, you read it.

This is the first post of a series of posts, in which I am going to describe the W3C data layer. A few months ago, I explained why it was a good idea to have a data layer. In this series, I am going to dive into the details of one particular data layer implementation: the W3C standard. For those of you who do not know what the W3C does, it is the international body that creates the standards that we use everyday on the web: HTML, CSS, Ajax… Although there are other options for data layers, like JSON-LD, I personally prefer the W3C standard; after all, this body has created some of the most important standards in the Internet.

Back in the old days, before SiteCatalyst 15 was released, the limitation in segmentation meant that, usually, you needed multiple report suites. You would usually have a combination of JavaScript and VISTA rules to do that segmentation (in case you are wondering, the S in VISTA stands for Segmentation), sending the data to different report suites. After that, you would also need a rollup to try to get an overall picture.

In my last post, I described a simple solution to track out-of-stock products using Adobe Analytics. As its name implies, this is a rather simple approach: you just get a count of the number of times an out-of-stock product is shown. For many, that might be enough, but there are many different requirements for a one-size-fits-all solution.

The wealthiest man in Spain (my home country) is the owner of Zara. There are Zara shops everywhere in the world. Just as an example, I was in Bangkok two months ago and I found a Zara store in one of the most popular shopping centres. The success of this company has been widely studied. One of the key success factors of this company is stock management. If you are interested in a detailed explanation, here you have a video that I found very interesting:

Back in the old days, when we used the traditional division between an s_code and on-page code, the concept of a data layer made little sense. The developers had to add some code server-side to generate the on-page code. Gathering the information to be captured was a server-side issue: the CMS would have to collect the information from one or various sources (CMS DB, CRM…) and present it on-page, so that, when calling s.t(), the s object would have all needed information.

The concept of a DMP (Data Management Platform) is not new in the digital marketing arena. However, there are still many marketers who do not know of this type of platform and what it can do for them. I will explain what is a DMP and what is Adobe Audience Manager.

Some time ago, I received an urgent call from a customer that claimed that DTM broke their website. They wanted to see me immediately, as that was causing a huge impact in them. Fortunately, the problems only manifested in staging, but they could not move to production. Once I arrived at my client’s office, I immediately realised what had happened: the data analyst had created some data elements using JavaScript he found on the Internet and he just copied and pasted the code. The code worked on his computer, so he went to approve and publish it. The reality was that his code only worked in IE and crashed in other browsers.

When creating both page load rules and event based rules in DTM, you have the option of configuring some conditions to determine when to fire those rules: parts of the URL, cookies, browser properties, JavaScript variables… If you add more than one condition, the AND boolean operator is applied to all conditions. However, in some cases, these out-of-the-box conditions are not enough. Thankfully, DTM offers the custom condition, where you can write pure JavaScript.

A few months ago, I was working with a customer on premise and the manager asked me a tricky question: how to organise the analytics team. That company was undergoing significant changes in the analytics front, as a few key members of this team were leaving. As with most questions in life, there is not a clear and definitive answer to this particular one. However, I can share what I have been seeing in my customers.

After publishing my previous post, where I recommended tracking the s_code version, I realised it could have been enhanced with a new type of version to track. Another version number that is even more useful is the sprint reference or whichever value you use to track each of the releases of the website. This idea came from one of my customers (thanks Glenn), who is under the process of redeveloping the whole website and analytics implementation. If you either have a development team that is continously adding new features to the web or are in profoundly redeveloping the website, you want to know the ROI of this invesment.

One of the suggestions I usually did when I worked with a new client was to track the s_code version. Now that we are moving to DTM, we do not have any more the concept of the s_code, but we have the concept of publishing new rules, which is similar to an s_code version. The idea is to keep a value in a prop, which is changed every time a new s_code is pushed live or a new set of rules is published. My typical suggestion is to add both a date and a version to the string.

Back in the old days, the only way to add Web analytics code to a website, was through manual coding. If you were using Adobe Analytics, you would need to add two pieces of code into the website: the s_code and the on-page code. The s_code is a JavaScript file with common code for Adobe Analytics (SiteCatalyst) and the on-page code contains the page-specific data.